#Where 2.0 - Day 2: Good Ideas but Lots of Questions

Where 2.0 Day 2 (or Day 1 given that the plenaries were held on Wednesday March 31) offered up great ideas and lots of questions:

Should "government be a platform" to support the development of applications that allows citizens better access to city government, for example? Tim O’Reilly spoke with the City of San Francisco’s, Chris Vein, about this idea. He asked Vein what he’s doing about it and while admitting that it was "terribly difficult" to work with the city, he offered up that he is banding together with other cities for developing an open and standardized API for many city departments. See the video at the end of this post.

Secondly, should the location-based social networking players like Foursquare and Gowalla, use a standard base map so that the same POIs and other locations are not continually being supported by their member’s own user-contributed data? Interesting idea but hard to imagine that each with give up that kind of control

Third, will there be a single way to "check-in" to all your social nets, like using "Check.in." Why do it multiple times for each service. It’s something that each will wrestle with for sure.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, what will the two-ton hippo (Google) and the 800-pound gorilla (Microsoft) do in social networking? Will they buy Foursquare or Twitter? Will they be happy as "just a platform" for maps and search? Each hover over Where 2.0 like holding court and have that unique position of watching and waiting.

And, as has been the case in years past at Where, many of these start-ups with great ideas, end up as carcasses along the side of the road. MSFT and GOOG have the luxury of time…but not too much time as the start-ups move fast and are building loyalty at a rapid pace. What’s different today? It’s the smartphone. It is the hardware platform that offers the advantage of connectivity and interaction.  It’s the game-changer that is catapulting lots of ideas and lots of questions.